It’s easy to lose yourself in the dark and dreamy world of Paola Ferrante’s Her Body Among Animals (Book*hug Press). This collection of short fiction absorbs and unsettles. It explores the pressure of the patriarchy with playful and twisted stories that have dazzled readers since the book’s release in 2023. Paola’s book has been a finalist for the 2024 Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, a runner-up for the 2023 Danuta Gleed Literary Award, the Silver Winner of the 2023 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award for Short Stories, and a finalist for the 2023 Shirley Jackson Awards.
We are delighted to have Paola here with us today to talk about how her stories pitch darkness into light. Welcome, Paola!
Paola Ferrante’s Her Body Among Animals, published by Book*hug Press.
Q: You've fashioned darkness in your stories into a force of light and release for some of your characters. Was this something you consciously did, or an unconscious reaction to the stories you are telling?
A: I’m a horror fan, which is probably no a secret to anyone who’s read Her Body Among Animals, considering how many times I talk about Michael Myers or the Enfield poltergeist. And one of my favourite horror movies, The Babadook, is favourite precisely because it has a completely non-traditional ending for a horror film. Hopefully I’m not spoiling this for anyone, but there’s something so satisfying in seeing the monster chained up in the basement, and the victims, the mother and her son, now completely unafraid of him and able to go about their lives. That to me was always the type of ending I wished to achieve in my own fiction. So aiming for the light, while diving deep into the dark, was my aspiration from the beginning.
Because I knew, going into it, that the stories in Her Body Among Animals were going to deal with some pretty dark subject matter. These are stories about postpartum anxiety, climate grief, domestic abuse, untreated and stigmatized depression, and general misogyny. The reason I told these stories using the conventions of dark fantasy, science fiction and horror, letting sentient sex robots and ghosts and urban legends about lizard men do a lot of the heavy lifting for me, was because I wanted my reader to actually “enjoy” the experience of engaging with difficult material. And there’s a difference between writing horror and being bleak, one I learned from reading Timothy Findley’s memoirs (who, as an aside, is probably my favourite Canadian writer of that generation). I will always remember reading Findley’s memoir when I was a baby writer in a university creative writing program. During one section, he spoke about burning an entire manuscript because he felt, when it was done, that it had nothing redeeming for the reader. So I was very conscious that, in a book about women’s resilience, about looking at the mistakes of the past, and about trauma, there had to be a light at the end of tunnel. There had to be something for the reader to grab onto.
I believe, as a writer of this kind of fiction, it’s my responsibility to offer an idea how things could be different, whether it’s a young woman deciding not to put her self on hold to go to Mars with her boyfriend, a teen boy acknowledging his culpability in bullying another boy, thereby contributing to the kind of toxic masculinity in his friend group that enabled his brother to commit a sexual assault, a woman breaking out of the expectations of childbearing in her marriage by electing to stay a spider, or a sex robot enacting some fiery revenge. I always think the reader needs to see a way out. Because I think one of the greatest things fiction gives us is the ability to play with ideas, to imagine alternate futures of better possibilities.
More about Her Body Among Animals:
In this genre-bending debut collection merging horror, fairy tales, pop culture, and sci-fi, women challenge the boundaries placed on their bodies while living in a world “among animals,” where violence is intertwined with bizarre ecological disruptions.
A sentient sex robot goes against her programming; a grad student living with depression is weighed down by an ever-present albatross; an unhappy wife turns into a spider; a boy with a dark secret is haunted by dolls; a couple bound for a colony on Mars take a road trip through Texas; a girl fights to save her sister from growing a mermaid tail like their absent mother.
Magical yet human, haunted and haunting, these stories act as a surreal documentation of the mistakes in systems of the past that remain very much in the present. Ferrante investigates toxic masculinity and the devastation it enacts upon women and our planet, delving into the universal undercurrent of ecological anxiety in the face of such toxicity, and the personal experience of being a new mother concerned about the future her child will face.
Through these confrontations of the complexity of living in a woman’s body, Her Body Among Animals moves us from hopelessness to a future of resilience and possibility.
Paola Ferrante is a writer living with depression. Her debut fiction collection, Her Body Among
Animals (Book*hug Press, 2023), was nominated for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and the Shirley Jackson Award, was a runner-up for the Danuta Gleed Award, a Silver Medal Winner in Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards, and was published in the UK by Influx Press in August 2024. Her fiction has been longlisted for the Journey Prize, and her debut poetry collection, What To Wear When Surviving a Lion Attack (Mansfield Press, 2019), was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. She was born, and still resides in, Toronto, with her partner Mat and their son.